Brainwaves of Sken

The big chore of the day was cleaning out my nightstand, where every piece of memorabilia I’ve gathered in the past thirteen years has been tossed (and transferred from place to place).

I found a lot of things, most of which I trashed. I stored every movie stub and concert ticket, including the signed Henry Rollins, the Matrix where we sat in the very front row and watched it twice, and the countless play bills starring girlfriends and best friends.

I tossed dozens of holiday cards, including some incredibly sweet ones for my 21st birthday.

I found a number of letters, too. Most of them were trashed, but one from a good friend anticipating being released from jail was touching and full of fervent desperation/anticipation.

A decade after anyone could possibly care, I think I understand someone I never did, through an old letter. Just so. I suppose I wish I wasn’t quite so self-involved (in my early 20’s, hah!). I never could get the hang of telling someone I loved them, but didn’t like them.

I used to carry, amongst the dozen photos and cookie fortunes, an Uthden Troll card in my pocket.

Red. 2/2. Regenerating.

I was pretty amazing. I’d like to be amazing again. It’s long past time to make that happen.

Posted in Big Things

I wish it were possible to see a direct comparison of U.S. GDP and safety/environmental regulations. Every time someone on the news rails about how regulations are hurting jobs, I wonder when someone, ANYONE (biased or not) is going to say that maybe destroying the ecosystem we rely on for our GDP is not worth the extra workers.

We are in an environment right now where saying such a thing would be toxic to one’s career as a politician or, in many circles, a reporter. Job-killer! I think that Clean Air Act style regulations do more to keep our economy sustainable than a few extra “dirty jobs” that take away the next generation’s ability to work.

When I hear about corporations complaining to the government that putting regulations on “frakking” for natural gas because local communities complain it pollutes their water, I wonder what the cost is to the local town and possible future businesses by that pollution.

Posted in Crit, Media, World News
Tags: economy, media

As of today, we’ve crossed the threshold of no return on moving to a house a mile from our lovely apartment.  Giving our notice was surreal, because our favorite curmudgeon passed this spring, and was replaced by … a curmudgeon of identical caliber.  She was reluctant to give us paper for our written notice.

The new place is on a hill in a forest clearing with a few other houses – it has a private back yard (nudist volleyball?  eh?! eh?!) with a fire pit, and a washer and dryer.  There are a lot of things about it that would make it a PITA to own, but we’re not looking to own it.  If our internets and our electricals work, we are golden.

Of course, nothing happens in a vacuum.  There are a ton of things happening this month, and we’ll probably be stopping at the house every day to shuffle off a few more boxes (hey, do you have any boxes?).  By the time Labor Day weekend comes, we’re hoping to ONLY be moving furniture.  And by we, I mean you. :D  We’ll feed and celebrate and thank profusely, but the time is not ripe to talk of such things!  Soon, my pretties…

Right now, I’m just thinking about the relaxacon coming up, Construct. I’m supposed to be running Geek Family Feud, though I haven’t done the work yet – today and tomorrow are my only days on that one! Additionally, we’re doing Papercraft Minecraft, which will be super fantastic. Anyone want to cut out a few hundred papercraft objects? :D

PS This is my first post on Brainwaves of Sken (having transferred the last ten years of blogging from Livejournal). I am still figuring out how I want to use the commenting system – I’d love to allow people to log in using LJ, Twitter, or Facebook, but I haven’t found the right plug-in for WordPress.

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Posted in Big Things
Tags: conventions, moving

This is in response to a post on a mailing list where someone said (to no one in specific, unbidden) for everyone to lighten up about movie flaws, because movies are just entertainment.

As a video editor, I am both more and less concerned about major flaws in movies.

I am less concerned, I think, because I have painful personal experience with how complicated and difficult it is to get everything right, and it is so much worse when you have so many people and it costs hundreds of thousands to reshoot a continuity problem. And worse, of course, is that before anything is edited, the movie is shot with a full story in mind. Then producers get their fingers in and what’s left on the cutting room floor (as it were) are the tendons – not delicious, but vital for holding things together. Sometimes the Director’s job comes down to just wrestling competing interests into a finished product before it gets axed.

I am -more- concerned because it is an art form I believe in, and it is just as much entertainment as a painting or a fine musical piece is. It embarrasses me when someone makes a Dances With Blue Wolves (3D!), because the director and writer don’t have any historical perspective, the story they’re trying to tell has been done over and over (and better), and they basically threw a shitload of money to create a piece of gilded crap. It’s definitely beautiful, absolutely! But I might as well be watching a high-definition screensaver. It embarrasses me, as a story teller, to see that get greenlit. Did he even realize that he was producing the same bullshit “white man saves the helpless savages and becomes a better native than the natives” that we’ve been telling for a hundred years?

Of course, it was greenlit because we’ll buy anything sensational, and everyone knows it. As consumers, we don’t really care. I’m sure you could find at least a half-dozen movies (and probably plenty more) in my library that are just as bad.

I don’t expect light fare to be anything more than light fare – but I want to see the same damned integrity to what they’re doing that I see in, at minimum, Spaceballs. I mean, really, at least Mel Brooks does his research.

Posted in Art, Crit
Tags: movies

There’s something fascinating about the recent blogger authenticity dramatics. Who would think that a straight man would spend years developing a blog as a gay woman in order to “cover the issues from that perspective”?

One (the Gay Girl in Syria) seems to be a fiction writer, and the other (creator of LezGetReal, a news blog from a lesbian perspective) was a retired guy from the military whose closest friends are a lesbian couple, and he was outraged about how they were treated under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

We’ve all known, of course, that the internet has an anonymizing factor. And many of us have known that people can change who they are for minor reasons, like participating in a hookup or romance website, or changing who we are for a bulletin board.

But these are prominent social personas a la Ender’s Game (without the philosophical misdirection). These are people who, more or less, dedicated their time online, even made a second career, out of blogging not just for a community that they cannot innately be a part of, but as if they were. The guy said he was the father of his persona, who was deaf, so he could interpret for her on phone interviews. He sent a copy of an ID, forged or photoshopped. Clearly, effort was spent to build up the persona.

I respect the feelings of betrayal by those who felt like they’d come to know these individuals, He lied about who he is, and lying is a betrayal. I see how it could affect people deeply, on a personal level. And I DO think it was counterproductive, causing suspicion and division amongst the group he was trying to forward, and perhaps making people outside of that group take it less seriously.

But sociologically, does it matter so much today? The creator of LezGetReal, from what I have read, covered issues of the day from the perspective of a lesbian. Other lesbian bloggers have said that the posts were timely and useful. Some have said that they “knew” something wasn’t right and that they were “unusually aggressive”, but how much of that is (deserved, let’s keep in mind) sour grapes after-the-fact? Obviously lesbians have their aggressive contingency, just like straight males (and everyone else), is that stereotyping just to make themselves feel better about being hoodwinked? I don’t care who you are, unless you have a super-secret handshake, you just can’t say for certainty that you’d know if someone was pretending to be someone they’re not.

Ultimately, an article about this asked, is the conclusion that you should trust no one online? I say yes, if what someone says they are is a priority to you, you should stick to people you can verify, like people you know in person, because right now nearly anyone can create an ID to fax, anyone can find or make ‘authentic’ photos, anyone can sit down and fashion a personality, for good or ill, online. Just like that sexy 20-something guy you’ve been chatting up could be a middle-aged man trying to recapture his youth, that bubbly young sex blogger could be an older woman who thinks she will get more hits if she appears to be a hip younger girl.

And a blog pursuing the rights and reactions of women who like other women will, surprise, get more attention when it appears to be written by a woman. It’s not a psychosis, even if it is unethical.

I think we all take for granted that people are exactly who they say they are an awful lot in real life. Reporters report the truthful news, even if they work for a company known to distort and deceive. Salesmen are just there to help you out, even if they’ll make more money by convincing you to buy something with more markup. Political commercials say they represent a grassroots upswell from the common man, when they’re paid for by extremist fringe groups.

At the same time, stepping out of the specific situation, I do believe that people need to spend more time genuinely putting themselves in the shoes of other people. What would it really be like to live, every day, without a home to go to? How does it actually feel to be rejected by the government for protection when someone says, “You’re a fag, I won’t rent to you” or “We don’t give marriage licenses to lezzbozzz like you” or “You can’t see your lover of 40 years on their dying day because we won’t acknowledge your family.”

I would never say that he ‘groks’ being gay – he was probably never harassed about his sexuality in his life, the entire american culture promotes his personal way of life, etc. But, shady method and all, at least this guy here seemed to care about (the issues of) people that weren’t exactly like himself to try and make a difference.

Sticking with the lesbian community just as an example, group authenticity is such a tangle. Are you a lesbian if you were born a man, transition to female in full faith that you are female inside, and are attracted to women? Are you authentically lesbian if you are femme and easily ‘pass’? Are you a lesbian if you only date women, but have sex with both genders? Or if you will have romantic relationships with anyone, but only have sex with women?

Most lesbians I know would say “yes” to each of those with or without some reservation, but there are plenty inside that community that think it is a betrayal and false if you are interested in men (or if you were a man). Similar comparisons can be made for many groups. When I was going to goth clubs, we rejected the kids who loved Marilyn Manson and the rave kids, because they weren’t “authentic” enough for us, but we are not the arbiters of who can identify with our cultural group. We don’t get to “decide” what is and is not steampunk, to pick a niche; we make up our own minds, and everyone else does, too.

I don’t have a conclusion here. This is just a trend we will increasingly have to cope with as people, earnestly or deceptively, choose to be whoever they want to be online.

Posted in Crit
Tags: blogging

Rooting out corruption and fraud was in their own self-interest. In the event of financial wrongdoing, they insisted, they would do their civic duty and protect the markets. But in late 2006, well before many of the other players on Wall Street realized what was going on, the top dogs at Goldman — including the aforementioned Viniar — started to fear they were sitting on a time bomb of billions in toxic assets. Yet instead of sounding the alarm, the very first thing Goldman did was tell no one. And the second thing it did was figure out a way to make money on the knowledge by screwing its own clients.

THIS is what worries me. We live in a world in which, more and more, we are expecting our own industries to self-regulate because it is in their supposed best interest to do so.

The reality is that corruption and fraud has proven to be so incredibly lucrative, and the punishment for fraud so completely nonexistent that it’s almost the fiscal duty of executives in major corporations to participate in fucking over everyone down the line, from their investors to their clients, and ultimately the system at large.

And we, as Americans, won’t do anything about it. We trust our American companies even when they screw us, just like we trust our politicians even as they take away rights that we’ve taken for granted for hundreds of years. We trust that they are really doing it for our best interest.

We need to be skeptical. We need to ask questions, to follow up, to assume the worst and protect ourselves. That is why we have “tangles” of regulation – because without it, a company knows that so much more money can be made screwing over their employees, their retired employees, and everyone else that a few hundred thousand in legal costs is nothing in comparison. Totally worth it.

If you think I’m being a little extreme, I encourage you to read the article. Think about how our state and our country continues to push for less and less regulation, and where that has gotten us so far.

This is just as depressing, to me, as hearing our governor talk about how slashing medicaid by 2/3rds won’t magically cause people to stop receiving treatment. As if that money would ever come out of anyone’s pocket but the consumer – consumers who have, by definition, no money to give. Just as depressing as our federal legislators declaring as a whole that there is no such thing as global warming (or severe climate change, if you will). Not even a matter of man-made or not, that it outright doesn’t exist, decades of science notwithstanding.

The reason our government is supposed to be divided from religious and commercial ventures is because their motivation is supposed to be to protect their constituency. I don’t think it works that way anymore, especially when someone can be in a top position in the FCC, pushing strongly against the regulation or restriction of a merger that will ruin competition in the cable marketplace, and then four months later leave to become a lobbyist for that company (Comcast).

Sorry to be a little ranty, but this stuff genuinely keeps me up at night. Our laws aren’t protecting us, our politicians are impotent and ineffective, if not outright corrupt, and any hard-nosed journalism that is left after the gutting and massive consolidation of the industry is too busy looking outward at three wars to give a damn about what is happening here.

I don’t know if there’s anywhere to turn to anymore, except to tuck in and protect your own… and that makes me part of the problem.

Posted in Uncategorized

Thanks so much to the awesome contestants and audience for Geek Family Feud at this last Penguicon!

Also, we owe a thank you to Trevor Jagoda, next year’s Con chair, for giving us the 5 free memberships we used as our grand prize!

We’re getting an early start on the next GFF by asking YOU to help us with questions!

If you think of yourself as a geek (of any flavor), please chip in a question or two at our survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/B2GXXJN

Posted in Uncategorized

First – I have completely missed all posts everywhere for the past week and a half. I have been entirely engrossed in my trip to the NAB conference in Vegas, which is finally done, hooray!

The whole weekend was pretty intense – an incredible number of people at that convention, all walks of life, all adult ages. You can’t tell the difference between a college student on a free exhibition badge and a young director looking to spend a few hundred grand on his next project.

The first two days of training were solely to prep me for the Apple Pro – Final Cut Pro Level One certification exam. I passed! It’s kind of a big deal to me, particularly since three of my new friends in class did not pass, and the instructor says pass rate at conferences is 40%.

We celebrated the end of that training by going to a grungy little british pub, where I had the blandest indian food I’ve ever eaten – which is probably appropriate, come to think of it. Beers all around, and hilarity ensued!

I walked and walked and walked, usually carrying my training books, notebook, and a metric tonne of brochures and free pens. Seriously, pens and lanyards were everywhere, and virtually no other loot to be had this year.

My next three days were ALSO spent training, but class-by-class, and maaaan, my brain filled up by the last day. I learned so much, not just about editing but about workflow and about thinking of the big picture. I’m grateful to have been allowed to go – it’s one of the cool things my job has afforded me.

I was there for the Final Cut Pro User Group Supermeet, which is essentially at 1500-person-strong party with a ton of vendors giving discounts and freebies. This year the vendors were kept to the entrance because Apple took over the entire show (a first), and used it as a sneak preview of the next version of the editing program. They’re dropping the price about 60% to $300, which is a pretty incredible thing. It won’t be out until June, but it is exciting enough that I would consider buying a new editing system just to work with it some more at home.

The flight there was pretty funny, with a cute lesbian flight attendant who did magic tricks like she was passing out food. ;) She made my ring disappear momentarily, but don’t worry, I was still married!

Coming back, I picked up tangerine penguin gummies for consolation prizes for Geek Family Feud at Penguicon, hehe. Lucy picked me up from my redeye flight and took care of me for the day, which was honestly super awesome.

Anyway, I have a lot to think about re: editing and work, and I have a ton to do before Penguicon arrives. I’m just really glad that I didn’t convince the bosses, fly out and study my ass off for nothing!

Oh, and what the certification means is that I can use an apple logo (with the appropriate text) on my business cards and any web sites or resumes I might have. Woohoo!

Posted in Uncategorized

The thing I love about science is that it does NOT try to tell you the “truth”. Hundreds of thousands of people over the last few hundred years have studied the world, asking questions, coming to conclusions, and having those conclusions challenged not just by peers but through future generations.

The fact that the Theory of Evolution is called a theory doesn’t make it more suspect than something else – it is an honest assertion that describes what we have learned through studying the world, SUBJECT TO CHANGE through other tests and experiments, or even through a change in perspective that more perfectly encompasses those results.

The biggest PR problem that Science has is that people keep comparing it to Faith, as if it were impossible for me to do my own experiments, my own studying of our physical world, and come to my own conclusions based on my own eyes and ears.

Just because I choose to trust vetted, argued-over conclusions by scientists as the best answers we have RIGHT NOW with the facts AT HAND does not equate my understanding of science with faith. Because faith implies truth, and science is not about what is true, only about what we think is true.

Posted in Uncategorized